SOUTHEAST ASIA: Pan-Islamic State Has Little Popular Support

By Marwaan Macan-Markar Reprint | | Print |

Marwaan Macan-Markar

BANGKOK, Oct 1 2002 (IPS) - Mosques dotted across Indonesia’s influential West Java region are sending out a message to their faithful that the political vision of some South-east Asian Islamic radicals will not find a receptive ear within these Mosque walls anytime soon.

The same is true of mosques in General Santos City, on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, a predominantly Muslim region where armed Muslim rebels have been active for years.

When sermons do touch on political topics here, says a regular mosque goer, it is more likely to touch on domestic issues of self-determination for the Muslims in Mindanao.

In Indonesia and the Philippines imams delivering their weekly sermons have barely touched on the pan-Islamic vision of Muslim radicals: to establish an Islamic state across the region.

Even Muslim leaders in Singapore have lined up against such pan-Islamic sentiments, choosing to do so by condemning pan-Islamism in the media.

The emerging pattern is convincing Islamic experts that South-east Asian Muslims in the main are averse to such grand designs of pan-Islamism being expounded by a radical fringe.

”Indonesian Muslims have grown up to be more critical in the way they think. The idea of an Islamic state is something from the past,” says Meflich Hasbullah, head of the history and Islamic civilisation department at the Islamic University in Bandung, Indonesia.

There is no evidence in Indonesia of broad support for a pan- Islamic state in the region, he says, but adds that the notion has a following among ”some small hard-line groups.”

A Thai academic from the country’s Muslim minority says the vision of an Islamic state spanning across the region ”serves as a critique of the existing nation-states, a reaction to what is happening politically and socially,” says Chaiwat Sath-Anand, director of the Peace Information Centre at Bangkok’s Thammasat University.

But like Hasbullah, Chaiwat contends that the idea has a limited constituency in the region. ”There has been the rhetoric, but I don’t think it is an easy idea for people to absorb,” he explains.

Such a reality also affirms that this region can still lay claim to being the world’s moderate face of Islam, be it in Indonesia, the largest Muslim country with its 170.3 million-strong Muslims, or the island nation of Singapore, where the 500,000 Muslims are in a minority.

The region’s second largest Muslim country, Malaysia, has 10.8 million Muslims, while predominantly Catholic Philippines has a 3.9 million Muslim minority concentrated largely in the south.

On the flip side of this political spectrum, however, are the men the governments of Singapore and neighbouring Malaysia arrested in the past weeks, who, officials from the two countries say, allegedly belong to Islamic extremist networks spread across five South-east Asian countries.

The 21 men arrested by Singaporean authorities, for instance, are allegedly linked to a group of radicals who aim to create an Islamic state by forging bonds with Muslim communities in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the southern Philippines and Brunei.

The organisation the arrested men have links to is Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), according to Singaporean and Malaysian officials. JI, the officials add, have ties with al-Qaeda, the group that the United States is after for its role in perpetrating the acts of terror in New York and Washington last September.

What is more, available records reveal that JI’s goal of an Islamic state can be traced to the vision of Darul Islam, an Islamic revival movement that was active in Indonesia in the late 1940s.

Darul Islam’s aspirations – to reclaim the prominence Islam enjoyed in South-east Asia around the 13th Century – were similar to other Islamic revivalist movements that have emerged in the Muslim world.

Among others who raised the banner of pan-Islamism in recent decades were the Muslim men who went to Afghanistan in the thousands in the 1980s to help liberate that Muslim country from occupation by the former Soviet Union.

Included in the ranks of these ‘mujahideen’ (Islamic fighters) in Afghanistan were Muslims from South-east Asia.

So far, the Malaysian government has arrested over 60 men it accuses of being Islamic militants, while the Singaporeans have taken into custody over 30 alleged Islamic militants.

Washington is currently applying pressure on the Indonesia government to follow the lead of its regional neighbours, given that it is the home of Abu Bakar Baasyir, a Muslim cleric named by Malaysian officials for being a key JI leader.

The security concerns that the arrests have spawned is ”a fair claim,” says Robert Karniol, Asia-Pacific editor of ”Jane’s Defence Weekly,” and has little to do with ”these countries jumping on board the U.S. agenda.”

What makes governments in the region worried is the ”transnational nature of the Islamic extremist organisations” unlike before, where there was a domestic streak in the character of militant movements, he adds. ”These groups have been established for several years.”

Yet there are voices urging caution as governments push ahead with efforts to curb the work of Muslim radicals in the region. ”Crackdowns are a good form of deterrence but they can have bad side effects,” says Panitan Wattanayagorn, a defence and security specialist at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.

But if the crackdowns are seen as illegitimate – such as governments who use them to go after their political opponents – it ”can be counter-productive,” he adds. ”It is a dilemma for all sides.”

Some Malaysian human rights activists have already expressed their suspicions about the men Kuala Lumpur has arrested under its harsh Internal Security Act.

For the charges of being Muslim militants to be credible, they have to be proved in court, the activists argue.

Already there are concerns in countries from Indonesia to the Philippines that the prevailing obsession to target Islamic extremism will serve to push more and more Muslim moderates into their ranks.

”Among many (Filipino Muslim) intellectuals, there is a greater concern about the current international paranoia about terrorists and terrorism, that this might make radicals of those who are still considered moderates,” says Rufia Guiam, director at the Centre for Peace and Development Studies at Mindanao State University.

Washington’s plans to attack Iraq will stoke this fire further, she adds. ”The continuing hardline stance of the US against Iraq will push some moderates to the extremist fold.”